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Tips & Strategies For Your Small Business.

How to Market Your Small Business Online

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How to Market Your Small Business Online

Small businesses today have more places and ways than ever to market themselves. Deciding on a marketing method, especially when starting out with a small budget can be challenging. While social media marketing is free, it is time-consuming. Traditional advertising, on the other hand, can be expensive.

So how to market your small business online? Which channels are best to use? Dozens of successful small business owners and marketing pros share the following list of strategies for startups and small businesses.

Use Social Media
If your small business isn’t present on social media, it is time to be. Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot says that social media produces double the marketing leads of telemarketing, trade shows, and direct mail.

It is best to choose one social media platform that your prospects, customers, and industry leaders engage with the most and start building a stable presence there. Once you have set up an account, start connecting with your audience by joining discussions, sharing original content, etc. Keep your efforts frequent and relevant to your audience.

Post to Instagram and Pinterest
If you are selling an interesting and highly-visual product, you should be regularly posting photos on Instagram and Pinterest. Posting is free on both platforms.

Eric Elkins is SEO at WideFoc.us and according to him you can drive traffic to your website via Pinterest and there is no better platform to build audiences than Instagram.

Mindy McCarthy is the owner of MinMac and her favorite place to sell handmade jewelry is Instagram. This platform is the queen of virtual markets. Customers can scroll through your product collection and purchase directly.

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Advertising for Small Business on a Budget

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Advertising for Small Business on a Budget

Know you need to get the word out about your small business but money is a problem? Luckily, you can advertise your small business on a budget.

Although marketing your business will be more difficult with little money, it is 100% doable to attract new customers that will push your business to the next level.

Advertising for small business on a budget is possible thanks to these cost-effective marketing strategies below.

Email Marketing
This is a simple and effective way to bring in new revenue. The best part? Email marketing is completely free.

This strategy comes down to collecting email addresses, nurturing leads with weekly emails, and selling to them to grow your business.

How do you do it and what you write is up to you, whether you email capture pop-ups to your site or add it into your ecommerce checkout process, it is an effective business practice to follow up with potential customers.

Improve Website for SEO
A few tweaks to your site can bring in more page views and customers. It is a fact and your small business should get on this.

There are tips to add to your site that will tip-off Google that your business is about this subject, in a specific location, and people looking for what you sell should be sent directly to your page.

One website optimized for search engines has a grasp one keywords, image titles and alt tags, headings, meta tags, header and footer information, external links, and valuable content.

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9 ways of marketing a product on social media

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9 ways of marketing a product on social media

With millions of people using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others, it is important to include these websites when promoting a new product. The number of people you can reach is one of the greatest benefits of using online communities to promote your product.

Using social media is a lot cheaper than advertising methods and traditional marketing. You can promote a product using social networking websites by determining where your potential customers are and getting your product out there on those sites.

One of the challenging parts, however, is coming up with fresh marketing ideas. Luckily, we can help you.

We’ve put together a list of creative ways of marketing a product on social media you can use to engage your followers. These ideas will help you provide more appealing and diverse content, no matter the type of business you are running.

Use More Emojis
Using emojis in your social media posts is a great way to connect with your followers while having fun at the same time.

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Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails

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Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails

Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails for Joomla 1.7+ with Administration Control Panel for multiple Banner Rotators.

This Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails has all the possible options you might need, is very versatile, easily resizable and easy to use.

It includes our powerful advanced dock menu for thumbnail along with its 30+ settings.

Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu

Options you can change in Administrator Backend:

  • size of the rotator (with and height in px)
  • dock menu show/hide/auto-hide (when mouse is out of the banner rotator)
  • navigational arrows show/hide/auto-hide
  • description show/hide/auto-hide
  • description background color and alpha
  • blur intensity for transitions
  • transition slide speed
  • initial position (first selected element)
  • autoplay timer (how much time to wait between rotating images)
  • for each item you can specify the thumbnail image, main image, title (for tooltip), description (optional), link url and target

Dock Menu options in the Administrator Backend (30+):

  • item size (width and height in px)
  • spacing between items (px)
  • zoom amount on mouseover
  • zoom speed on mouseover
  • amount of zoom/position influence on adjacent items
  • y axis offset (px) for zooming (dock can open upwards, downwards or centered )
  • reflection on/off, reflection size, reflection alpha and reflection distance from the picture
  • brighten item on mouseover on/off and amount of brightness
  • tooltip on/off, tooltip skin (white/black), tooltip placement on top, bottom or follow mouse, y axis offset of the tooltip (move it up or down)
  • independent stroke size and color setting for all three states : normal, mouseover and selected. Stroke can be set to 0 independently if you don’t want stroke for any/all of the states.
  • and quite a few more

This Advanced Banner Rotator with Dock Menu Thumbnails is seriously powerful as you can see from the ton of options, don’t miss out !

Advanced Banner Rotator DM: Demo | License | Requirements | Support | Tips
When you install com_wmt_advanced_banner_rotator_dm, Demo Banner rotator is installed by default.

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9 Elements for Small Business Marketing Plan

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9 elements for small business marketing plan

Having a business marketing plan is very important for any business of the company in order to achieve organizational goals. The right marketing plan identifies who your target customers are, how you will get to them, and how you will retain your current customers so they always purchase from you.

When done properly, your small business marketing plan will the road map you follow to get customers and improve the success of your company. Here are 9 elements every successful business marketing plan should include.

Summary of the Business Model

The executive summary of the plan should define the details of what your business is all about including your goals and objectives.

The overall summary should be clear with the core values and positioning in the market. Also, it must explain how the brand will enter the market, first locally and then internationally. Further, it focuses on financial and generation resources.

Clear Strategy that Must be Followed

When it comes to your product strategy, you should be as clear as possible. You may survey the situation using details of your customers. For example, the product or company mission, resource availability, marketing and financial objectives, cash flow analysis, and competitive analysis.

Availability of Products/Services

Business owners should have an understanding of how their products will reach their potential customers.

Having high-quality products is just one part of the marketing plan for small business. You must make your products available in a cost-effective manner. This should be the ultimate goal of the entrepreneur and it can be accomplished by making the best use of promotional activities, team, advertising methods, and other tools used for communication.

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Responsive Grid Gallery – Joomla Component

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Responsive Grid Gallery - Joomla Component

Responsive Grid Gallery – Joomla Component – responsive and adaptive design, optimized for desktop, mobile and tablet browsers, 6 types item hover animation, easy install and use, Joomla 2.5 and 3.x compatible, unlimited items. Free download from our download section

Responsive Grid Gallery – Front-end Preview

Add new category, and add images to category

To setup Responsive Grid Gallery navigate to Components –> Responsive Grid Gallery –> Responsive Grid Gallery

Then click on the New button to create new Responsive Grid Gallery.

Fill in the required fields:

Title (title of your Grid Gallery)
Description.
On your right side you have form to add image/s to your Responsive Grid Gallery.

Click Browse to select image for upload
Title (title for that image)
Description (for that image)

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All Around Portfolio – Joomla Component

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All Around Portfolio - Joomla Component

All Around Portfolio – Joomla Component can display your company services, personal portfolio, products, real-estate properties, vacation/holiday offers, cooking recipes and much much more.

If you want to test All Around Portfolio on your website, you can download TEST VERSION from our Download section.

Limitations in TEST VERSION
5 categories
only 1 category with 3 items
you can only edit 3 items

Add new Portfolio categories, and add entries to Portfolio categories

Navigate to Components –> All around Portfolio –> All around Portfolio’s

(here you can manage portfolio categories. You can edit category name and thumbnail, you can delete or unpublish selected category) allaround_1.png

To add category click on the New button:

Enter category name and select thumbnail for that category and click on Save & Close

Now you can add Portfolio entries to that category by clicking on the Manage Entries link next to the created category:

(here you can manage Portfolio entries for that category. You can edit entry name and description, you can delete or unpublish selected entry)

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uSquare – Responsive Squared Grid – Joomla 2.5+

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uSquare - responsive squared grid - Joomla 2.5+

Another very interesting thing that is going on is the fact that on-line shopping is becoming more and more convenient than regular shopping. Furthermore, when people are searching for any kind of service, they will certainly rather Google it from the comfort of their own home than go for a long walk in search for whatever it is they need. So, whatever it is you are trying to sell, you need a cool looking web-site, so that you don’t go bankrupt. Even if we are talking about some kind of blog, if the blog is not visited regularly, it kind of misses its point, right?

Let’s cut to the chase!

So, you have to have a great site, and you are not a web-design and development team. Hmmm… What to do? Well, you can go on-line, find something that you like, buy it, modify it a bit, and there you go. It’s always a good idea to go for a tested and tried product, and an organized uSquare plug-in definitely fits this description – with over 1800 sales on the WordPress platform and 2500 sales overall, it’s one of the very popular choices for an admin that wants functionality and style on his site.

In the following piece of text, I will present to you a responsive grid for WordPress, which is, in my opinion excellent for whatever it is that you are “selling”. It is called uSquare Component for Joomla 2.5+ CMS , and you should definitely check it out. First of all, when I said that it is responsive, to those of you who are not acquainted with the term, it means that it will fit every screen resolution, which means that it can easily be accessible via loads of devices.

In comparison to most other “responsive” thingies that you can buy on-line, the team that developed this one put a lot of effort in making the responsive part of the plug-in do the work properly. Furthermore, it is organized so that you can make it your team or services page, or you can attach blog posts.

You can display whatever products you are selling with it and, frankly speaking, you can use it for pretty much anything you like and anything you can think of.

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6 insider marketing tips for social media

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6 insider marketing tips for social media

It is about a time for businesses and brands to take full advantage of the following marketing tips for social media when it comes to promoting products and reaching out to the target audience.

As time goes by, the digital marketing space evolves by the minute and it is something you as a business owner can’t ignore. With so many social media marketing trends, there are so many opportunities to succeed as an online business.

If you want to achieve success it is best to stay on top of trends and decide what is best for your business. So, do you want to know how others took advantage of social media and achieved success?

We asked social media pros to share some of the best social media marketing tips of businesses. Here is what they have to say.

Get the Attention of Famous Influencers
Influencers are important today, for every business, in every niche. They are extremely active on social media, have “real” jobs, and spend their time blogging and sharing content online. Attracting their attention is not easy, even if you give away free gifts.

Experts say that social media is 4-1-1 sharing system that allows a business to get better visibility with social influencers.

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4 Best Web-Development Tools Used to Reduce Coding

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4 Best Web-Development Tools Used to Reduce Coding

The web-development business is growing every day. This means that it is becoming more and more complicated to keep up with the competition, if you are in that business, of course. In order to do this, there are 3 major solutions.

Firstly, one can write numerous pages of code from scratch, but this takes up a lot of time, so this is not advisable.

Secondly, one can always purchase applications online (this is the easiest way), but these applications can cost a fortune, and this is also not advisable, especially if you don’t have money to through away (like most web developers nowadays).

The 3rd solution is somewhere in between the two mentioned above. There are numerous web-development tools on the internet that can help the web developer a lot by reducing the long and exhausting coding process. In the following text, there is a list of the 4 best tools that are both user-friendly and smart enough to generate complicated pieces of code, just like a very experienced web developer.

They have all proven to be very helpful in my web-development experience.

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